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Reinvent This

On Tuesday, June 18 (tomorrow, if you're reading this the day I post it), I'll be leading a roundtable discussion on "reinventing climate management" over at ReInventors.net. It will convene via Google Plus Hangouts, and will be accessible via the above link. Here's a taste of the promo text:

Managing the climate in the face of global warming is a wicked problem with almost no precedent. Given the global nature of the problem, no one nation can solve it without getting virtually all other nations involved. Even if Americans stopped driving cars and eating meat en masse tomorrow, it would not make much of a dent if the Chinese kept burning coal at their mad pace. India, Japan, even Canada all play outsized roles.

[...] During this roundtable we will face up to this extremely difficult problem and talk about how to Reinvent Climate Management. What would a system of global governance look like that’s up to the true challenges ahead? What kind of authority would it need? If actors like rogue nations or geoengineering tech titans broke the rules, what could be done? We’ll look at a range of possibilities, including those that don’t involve big government. Is there a bottom-up way forward? One led by corporations?

I honestly have no idea how far we'll get with this discussion. We know that the current model for dealing with global climate issues is broken, but most of the alternatives -- such as solar radiation management geoengineering or militarization of environmental management -- seem more like knee-jerk reactions from desperation rather than a smart, long-term system for stability. My hope is that a roundtable of smart, interesting people will be able to envision something usefully transcendent (or, failing that, at least useful).

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